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Russian Nature Vocabulary — Words for the Natural World

Nature words are a wonderful place to start Russian: they're concrete, they come up often, and they give you an early reason to read the Cyrillic alphabet. This page collects Russian vocabulary for the natural world — лес (forest), река (river), солнце (sun), дерево (tree) — each paired with its English meaning and audio. Two notes for English speakers. First, Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which looks daunting but is learnable in days; a few letters are false friends (р is "r", с is "s"), and the rest soon click. Second, Russian stress is mobile and unmarked in normal writing — it can fall on any syllable and it changes the vowel sounds, so you genuinely cannot tell from the spelling alone where the emphasis goes. That makes the audio essential: tap any 🔊 to hear exactly where the stress lands. Read the list to start decoding the letters, then take the words into the game below, where seeing, hearing and matching them turns Cyrillic from a puzzle into reading.

Key words explained

• dog собака🔊 Their dog barks at every passing car.
• cat кошка🔊 The cat curled up on the warm windowsill.
• bird птица🔊 A small bird built its nest in the hedge.
• horse лошадь🔊 She rode the horse along the quiet trail.
• cow корова🔊 A cow grazed lazily in the green field.
• sheep овца🔊 The farmer counted his sheep at dusk.
• pig свинья🔊 The pig rolled happily in the cool mud.
• rabbit кролик🔊 A wild rabbit darted across the path.

All 150 Russian nature words

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